Communication is critical in both business and personal aspects of life. With the advent of the Internet and cellular networks, a variety of ways to communicate are available, such as use of cellular phones, pagers, emails, instant messages, facsimile machines, voicemail systems, and traditional telephones. Today's typical telecommunications subscriber has access to and frequently utilizes a number, if not all, of these methods to both transmit and receive communications.
Currently available call forwarding services attempt to direct high-priority communications to high-priority destinations such as cell phones. These call forwarding systems allow a subscriber to input information regarding a current location (e.g., a particular telephone at a location, such as an office phone or a conference room phone), thereby allowing incoming calls to be routed to that current location. However, these conventional call forwarding systems only operate within an interoffice switchboard such that employees of a particular company are the only possible users of the call forwarding system.
Other conventional call forwarding systems available to the public on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) are similarly unsophisticated and non-dynamic. One typical call forwarding system over the PSTN alerts a subscriber telephone station connected to the Internet of a waiting call via the Internet connection. The waiting call is forwarded via the PSTN to a services platform, which, in turn, establishes a connection to the subscriber using the Internet. The services platform then notifies the subscriber of the waiting call via the Internet connection and, responsive to a choice by the subscriber, may forward the telephone call to the subscriber via the Internet without interrupting the subscriber's Internet connection. However, in this limited system, call forwarding is only triggered by a busy/no answer signal, and the waiting call only forwarded to the destination where the Internet connection is established. Such a limited system also does not provide a mechanism for submitting dynamic instructions for the forwarding of waiting calls.